San Jose Businesswoman Pleads Guilty To Tech Worker Visa Fraud

SAN JOSE, CA - A San Jose businesswoman pleaded guilty in federal court today to three counts of visa fraud, announced U.S. Attorney Brian J. Stretch Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) Special Agent in Charge Ryan L. Spradlin. The guilty plea was accepted by the Honorable Lucy H. Koh, U.S. District Judge.

In pleading guilty, Sridevi Aiyaswamy, 50, of San Jose, admitted that between April 2010 and June 2013 she made numerous false statements, and submitted over 25 fraudulent documents, to the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) for the purpose of obtaining H-1B non-immigrant classifications for skilled foreign workers. Acting as a petitioner on behalf of foreign worker beneficiaries, Aiyaswamy falsely represented in I-129 petitions that the foreign worker beneficiaries would be working at Cisco, an information technology and networking company in San Jose, Calif. Aiayswamy further submitted counterfeit statements of work with forged signatures as back-up documentation to the I-129 petitions. In fact, at the time she submitted these documents to USCIS, Aiyaswamy knew that the statements regarding offers of work from Cisco for these beneficiaries were false statements, and that Cisco had not made any offers of employment regarding these individuals.

A federal grand jury indicted Aiyaswamy on December 3, 2015, charging her with 34 counts of visa fraud, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1546(a). Pursuant to today’s pea agreement, Aiyaswamy pleaded guilty to three of the counts of visa fraud and the government agreed to request dismissal of the remaining counts.

Aiyaswamy is currently free on bond. Judge Koh scheduled her sentencing for November 15, 2017, at 9:15 a.m. The maximum statutory penalty for visa fraud is 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. However, any sentence following conviction will be imposed by the court only after consideration of the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines and the federal statute governing the imposition of a sentence, 18 U.S.C. § 3553.

More news from the racist human-traffickers known as Infosys, and it looks like this may be the next Enron:

As he looks to rebound from an estimated $1 million loss stemming from allegations of workplace discrimination, a fired employee with India-based tech giant Infosys may have a powerful ally: President Donald Trump.

The leader of the free world has placed particular emphasis on the hiring and firing of American workers.

And the details in the case of Erin Green, who says he was passed over for promotion while watching foreign workers advance in the company, would likely resonate with those who back Trump's "America First" agenda.

...Bergin estimates that's more than 70 percent of the company's U.S. workforce. And since Infosys is based in India, most of those visa holders come from the subcontinent, he and other observers said.

"From the company standpoint, as far as what would move the stock, that would be something that would adversely impact the number of H-1B visas that are available each year to be used ... or anything that changes minimum salary requirements," Bergin said.

BTW, the last time I suggested shorting Infoshit was back in May 7 2011, and if one would have followed my advice then, they could have profited from the almost 50% drop that happened shortly after my suggestion to buy Jan 2012 puts.

"...Is not this evidence, given the repeated nature of the company's infractions, sufficient for either the Department of Labor to put Infosys on the debarred list or for the Department of Homeland Security [DHS] to take similar action?"

The answer is unambiguously yes. And the form that action should take is criminal prosecution, both of the corporation as a legal entity, as well as all those Infosys officials individually who are discovered to have participated in this scheme. I can think of at least two federal felony violations that are relevant:

Whoever knowingly makes under oath, or ... knowingly subscribes as true, any false statement with respect to a material fact in any application, affidavit, or other document required by the immigration laws. ... Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned ... 10 years (in the case of the first or second such offense, if the offense was not committed to facilitate such an act of international terrorism or a drug trafficking crime).

While this would seem to apply only to the worker-applicant who was advised to lie, two other provisions of the federal criminal code make clear that the company and its officials are also culpable. 18 U.S.C. Section 2 and 18 U.S.C. Section 371, punish anyone who "aids, abets, counsels, commands, induces or procures" commission of a crime, as well as "two or more persons [who] conspire either to commit any offense against the United States, or to defraud the United States."

Conspiracy to Bring in and Harbor Aliens. This provision of law, found at 8 U.S.C. Section 1324 provides, at subsections (a)(1)(A)(iv) and (v), that:

(A) Any person who ... (iv) encourages or induces an alien to come to, enter, or reside in the United States, knowing or in reckless disregard of the fact that such coming to, entry, or residence is or will be in violation of law; or (v) ... (I) engages in any conspiracy to commit any of the preceding acts, or (II) aids or abets the commission of any of the preceding acts,shall be punished as provided in subparagraph (B).

(B) A person who violates subparagraph (A) shall, for each alien in respect to whom such a violation occurs...in which the offense was done for the purpose of commercial advantage or private financial gain, be fined under title 18, imprisoned not more than 10 years, or both. (Emphasis added.)

These federal criminal statutes certainly encompass the situation as it seems to have unfolded in the New York attorney general's lawsuit. What's more, because of that lawsuit, a great deal of the spadework usually required of an investigator has already been done. Such matters fall squarely into the purview of Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), a division within Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which itself is a component of DHS.

I can't believe it's been almost 11 years and I am still blogging away. My blog has been shut down in the USA, Panama, and Canada, but I have found a stable ISP in Malaysia that doesn't respond to US court orders and C&Ds. I don't post as much, and most of my stuff is just re-posts from other sources. I've been too busy working 50-60 hours a week at the curry den I am currently contracting at, and I've been working on my Masters degree for the past few years. I'll be done with school in a month, so I may get back to some of my more creative blogging, like back in the day.

Things are looking up for the insurgency now that Trump is prez, and even though there has been no drastic action on the slumdog slave trade front, I do think change is in the air. The fucking slumdog infested company I am working at now had the nerve to layoff 100+ Americans at the beginning of the year, and I know of about a half dozen new hires since -- all from The Land That Time Forgot. However, I believe that by the end of the year, we will see wages rise in IT and the slumdog purge begin as they are priced out of the market and companies decide not to waste their time on the H-1B paperwork and bad karma that is involved with filling their IT shops with curry-eating wage-pirates.

It's been a long time since the days of doing rhetorical combat on the DICE discussion boards, and the slumdogs are a lot less arrogant now, at least online. But trust me, they are still just as full of themselves and delusional in the curry dens like the one I work at. They have taken over entire departments, like QA, and have their stinky potluck shitshows once a week, and babble in Hinglish all day.

I have been on a death march of a project for the last few months, led by an incompetent slumdog VP who is a master of the circular head bobble. The business analyst that is supposed to be getting all the reqs. for this fucked up project and she is the slumdog wife of the Desi DBA whom I am forced to deal with on a daily basis. I call it the Triangle of Desi Death. The horror...

I have recently come to the conclusion that the DBA and his BA wife have conspired to sabotage the project so that I get thrown under the bus and the slumdog VP escapes without blame when things blow up. The other night this stupid fuckin' DBA, who walks around like his curry-scented shit doesn't stink and is always trying to act like he his some sort of genius, had one job -- RESTORE THE DATABASE. Of course, he fucked that up, and I was there until 9 PM on a Friday while he tried to call all his Indian buddies, including the slumdog VP, to try to get the system back up. The one guy he wouldn't call was the ops manager, a redneck IT old-timer who would have reamed his ass. "No, don't call Bob, he will panic!", slumdog DBA begged. I let it slide, but I am waiting to pull his punk card when the time comes.

In the meantime slumdog DBA keeps refusing to grant me DB rights, and then he starts an email shit-storm when the meager drive space he allocated to me fills up. The cheap motherfucker (is there any other type of Indian?) acts like he is paying for the storage out of his own fucking pocket. So I finally get his honkey manager to give me the drive space, and this manager sends an email to his whole crew of DBAs to give me whatever the fuck I need. Of course, this infuriates slumdog DBA, so he makes a big deal out of it, but ends of looking like an idiot because he is the one that put the DB logs and transaction files on tiny drives on the SAN. He acts like I am minting bitcoins or hoarding kiddie porn on these drives, when all I am doing is running a major ETL job THAT HAS TO FUCKING WORK THE FIRST TIME OR THE WHOLE PROJECT IS FUCKED.

To top it off, his slumdog wife, the Desi BA, is spitting out incoherent specs that all clearly designed to confuse anybody who has to understand them. She constantly has PMs and QA managers in her cube trying to figure out WTF is going on, and she has taken to giving me the stink eye when I try to get some clarification -- she doesn't even read, much less answer my emails, and hasn't done so for months. I've made it a point to update my PM when he comes by my cube, loudly letting him know that "I would be done, but I am waiting for [slumdog BA] to give me the reqs" at which point she has to emerge from her curry-scented Hindu shrine of a cubicle to make some excuse about why she can't do her fucking job. Cunt.

Anyway, HAPPY 4th OF FUCKING JULY, and hopefully by this time next year, we will be celebrating independence from the HINDU MAFIA.

Disclaimer
The thoughts expressed on this blog may or may not be the author's own and are protected
by the 1st Amendment. Any attempt to reveal his identity by contacting a slumdog
hack at Google, or a corrupt Desi sys-admin at his ISP will be dealt with promptly
and severely. Civil and criminal penalties may apply if one is found to have used
private information in an attempt to get the author fired at the Hindu-only I.T.
ghetto he currently works at. In addition, any Desi who attempts to burn the author's
house down because they are enraged over his writing will be prosecuted to the fullest
extent of the law. This isn't India.